1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to methods for providing printer driver programs, and in particular, it relates to methods for providing Job Definition Format (JDF) printer driver programs.
2. Description of Related Art
Job Description Format (JDF) is a technical standard developed by the printing industry to facilitate cross-vendor workflow implementations of printer applications. It is an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based format for print job order files, often referred to as “job tickets”.
A job ticket contains specified values of various print job parameters, and associates itself to one or more source files (i.e. the documents to be printed). A typical job ticket may include a job ticket number, ticket name, and the values of various job parameters such as job information settings, basic settings (e.g. number of copies, orientation of paper, collate, offset printing, original paper size, output paper size, paper type, paper source, etc.), layout settings, cover sheet, finishing settings, inter-sheet settings, tab-paper settings, image quality settings, and customer information.
Various standards have been developed for the formats of writing a print job ticket, including the Print Production Format (PPF) and the Portable Job Ticket Format (PJTF). JDF is built upon these existing formats and provides three primary benefits to the printing industry: (1) the ability to unify the prepress, press and post-press aspects of any printing job; (2) the means to bridge the communication gap between production services and management information systems (MIS); and (3) the ability to carry out both of these functions no matter what system architecture is already in place and no matter what tools are being used to complete the job.
JDF provides a versatile and comprehensive interchange data format to be used by a system of administrative and implementation-oriented components, which together produce printed products. It provides the means to describe print jobs in terms of the products eventually to be created, as well as in terms of the processes needed to create those products. The format provides a mechanism to explicitly specify the controls needed by each process, which may be specific to the printers that will execute the processes.
Many printing devices now are “JDF compatible”, i.e., can process a JDF job ticket to perform a printing job. They typically have a print server or other control devices for receiving a JDF job ticket and processing the information specified in the JDF job ticket to directly control the print job. However, a JDF job ticket still needs to be generated in accordance with the device capabilities of a particular printing device, which will determine what JDF entries may or may not be acceptable by the specific printing device.
In a typical printing workflow that involves JDF, a printing application generates and sends a JDF print job ticket to be executed on a printing device. Before sending the JDF job ticket, the application must first know what JDF entries in the job ticket the device will actually accept. This is generally accomplished by first querying the printing device for its device capabilities. The device capabilities will tell the application what specific JDF entries will be accepted and executed on the printing device. The method for achieving this compatibility between the generated JDF job ticket and a device's capabilities are application-specific, as some JDF-based printing applications may not be able to support all JDF compatible printing devices because they may have a particular way of generating JDF job tickets that may or may not be compatible with a particular printing device.
Various methods and programs have been developed to generate printer device-specific JDF job tickets. For example, U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0279125 A1 describes a method for generating a JDF job ticket using a printer definition file (e.g., a Postscript Printer Definition (PPD) file, or a General Printer Definition (GPD) file) corresponding to a specific printing system, by defining print parameters from selected available features in the printer definition file. The available features in the printer definition file may be presented to an application program or to a user. The application or user may select desired features from those presented. The JDF elements corresponding to the selected features are output and stored as a JDF job ticket representing a print job to be processed by the selected printing system according to the defined print parameters.
When a printer definition file for a particular printing system is not readily available, a user may have to create a compatible JDF job ticket for a printing device by inspecting its device capabilities manually. But this can be quite a difficult task at times, especially if the user is not familiar with device capabilities and how they work, or if the user is not familiar with JDF, as the JDF job ticket must be created without error, i.e., it must be syntactically and semantically correct in JDF and also in accordance with the printing device's capabilities.
Printer drivers are computer software programs that convert the data to be printed to the form specific to a printing device. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,975,415 B2 describes a printer with a data processing apparatus that uses a printer driver software to set print conditions. The general purpose of using printer drivers is to allow applications to perform printing jobs without knowing the technical details of each printer model.